


you'd be the love of my life when i was young

by lovealwayskatie



Series: 21 // rini [2]
Category: High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (TV)
Genre: F/M, song ficish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:53:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25371184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovealwayskatie/pseuds/lovealwayskatie
Summary: The last time that she saw Ricky Bowen, she was sixteen, and he was halfway out the door of her room, tripping over himself after she stupidly, embarrassingly, cringe-worthily told him that she loved him. / in which Ricky and Nini reconnect years after "I love you" goes wrong
Relationships: Ricky Bowen/Nini Salazar-Roberts
Series: 21 // rini [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1787995
Comments: 16
Kudos: 89





	you'd be the love of my life when i was young

**Author's Note:**

> title is from "21" by gracie abrams for the rini + 21 fic collection. additional inspiration from friends.
> 
> shout out to the anonymous cc that asked sabrina about this series yesterday on twitter - this one's for you

The last time that she saw Ricky Bowen, she was sixteen, and he was halfway out the door of her room, tripping over himself after she stupidly, embarrassingly, cringe-worthily told him that she loved him. He suggested that they take a break since, after all, she was going to camp for the summer and then to the Youth Actors Conservatory for the last two years of high school, so wouldn’t it just be better if they chilled for a second?

Incredulous, she stared as he went, her best friend newly unrecognizable through her blurry eyes.

They talked once more over the phone two days before she left for school that fall. This time, she felt like a new person, entirely unlike the girl who wanted to spin around the sun again and again with a boy who didn’t even love her back, perfectly capable of ripping off the Band-Aid in telling him that it wasn’t a break but a breakup now.

She was Nini Salazar-Roberts: sixteen, assured, and starting over.

She goes to the YAC and loves it, doing her best to learn as much as she can. She does time steps in tap class and learns how to work a lighting board and plays Cinderella in their production of Into the Woods, and she doesn’t think of how Ricky thought it was endless comedy to say gesundheit anytime someone said Sondheim. She spends the summer before her senior year at Stagedoor Manor, only briefly swinging through Salt Lake City, and she doesn’t wonder what he’s doing for break. She closes out her time at the YAC with the lead role in Thoroughly Modern Millie and graduates high school with Berklee College of Music on the horizon, and she doesn’t think about where he’s going to college. She goes to Berklee, learning even more as she hones her craft as a musician, and carves out a corner for herself in Boston with new friends for four deliriously packed years, and she doesn’t even consider what Ricky Bowen is up to.

Now, she’s Nini Salazar-Roberts: twenty-two, assured, and starting over as the newest music teacher at New York City’s acclaimed performing arts high school, LaGuardia. The job came through a recommendation of one of her Berklee professors, and her apartment in the city comes through Kourtney, the only friend from East High that she stayed in close contact with after transferring to the YAC.

Her move is both terrible and incredible timing: Kourtney, her should-have-been closest friend in the city, is moving to Los Angeles for a job on one of those CW shows as a makeup artist. This also means, though, that Kourtney’s leaving behind a room in a Lower East Side apartment that desperately needs to be filled.

She moves in on the first Saturday of August, barely able to peer over the top of the two cardboard boxes she’s juggling up the stairs, and just as she turns the corner to her apartment, the one with the brass 3B on the door, she finds herself face to face with Ricky Bowen for the first time since she told him that she loved him.

It’s a miracle she manages not to drop her belongings right then and there.

She knows he lives in New York City. Kourtney reminded her of such when telling her all about the building and her roommates—Ashlyn, another East High survivor, and Gina, an actual Radio City Rockette. Kourtney told her what seemed like everything she’d need to know: the best place to order Chinese food, how long to wait for the shower to actually heat up, the best time to use the in-building washing machine in the basement to avoid getting her half-soaked clothes dumped out by another impatient resident.

What Kourtney failed to mention, however, is that Ricky Bowen lives next door.

Turning from the door marked 3A after he locks up, he blinks in surprise when he sees her—but evidently not as surprised as she feels given how quickly he recovers, the flicker of shock in his eyes disappearing as quickly as she catches it.

“Hey,” he says. She doesn’t know how it’s possible that he looks exactly the same, but he does. “I didn’t know that you were moving in today.”

She briefly wonders if he thinks she looks the same too.

She grits her teeth through the smile she plasters on her face, gripping onto the boxes in her arms even tighter. “Yep! Today’s the day! Happy moving day! Welcome to New York!” she cheers, internally cringing at the manic tone her voice adopts as she rambles.

He raises an eyebrow, one corner of his mouth curving into a half-smile. “It’s been waiting for you?”

She forces herself to laugh, altogether too loudly for a pretty basic Taylor Swift pun, and Ricky eyes her cautiously. “Do you need help with your boxes or anything?”

“No, I’m totally fine,” she replies, shaking her head. As she does, the boxes in her hands slip, and she fumbles to adjust her grip before recovering.

“Right, so,” he says after a long silence. “See you around?”

She nods, agreeing, “Definitely.” Because it’s not like she has a choice, right?

\---

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me he lived next door,” she tells Kourtney over FaceTime, her room still in a state of half-packed disarray.

“I didn’t think that you’d take the room if you knew,” Kourtney says. “And I didn’t want you to be homeless!”

Nini rolls her eyes. She’s certain that she only acted so stupidly because she’d been taken by surprise, not because running into a childhood boyfriend actually affects her. She’s great at being friends with her exes. “I’m not mad,” she finally concedes. “Just disappointed.”

“Okay, _mom_.”

\---

The next time that she sees Ricky, it’s at her own Welcome to the City party that Gina insists on throwing. So far, she likes living with both girls, but the room full of strangers is a little overwhelming given that she still has to use Google Maps to navigate her commute to work. But she meets the other guys Ricky lives with and likes them, learning that they were all college roommates. Big Red works as a line cook in an upscale Midtown restaurant, and E.J. walks, talks, and acts like the finance bro that she learns he is.

She’s in the empty kitchen, trying and failing to open a new bottle of wine but mostly looking for a moment to be alone, when Ricky finds her.

“Hey,” he says and seeing her struggle with the opener, asks, “Do you need help with that?”

Before she can answer, he reaches for the wine bottle, his hand brushing against hers, and she yanks on the bottle opener a little too hard, ripping out the cork and sending it flying behind her until it rolls under their fridge.

“I got it,” she squeaks.

In six years, she never let Ricky Bowen occupy much of her headspace, though, granted, he still managed to sneak into her thoughts on the occasion. She always brushed it off under the guise of how long they’d been friends—after all, at one point in time, not a person in this world knew her better.

But it isn’t like she sat around pining for her first boyfriend, any prior feelings for him withering away into indifference years ago. So she wishes she could pinpoint why she’s acting like such an idiot now, and she can’t help feeling deeply annoyed with herself. It’s just Ricky. And if she’s going to be stuck seeing him, she needs to build a bridge and get over whatever’s gotten into her fast.

He holds out his glass for her to pour, and she does before refilling her own, letting it fill up close to the brim. She takes a large gulp before mustering up the friendliest smile that she can. Bridge building starts now. “So. What’s new?”

Even though he has six years of his own life that would constitute as new to her, he settles on telling her, “My dad’s remarried now. One year anniversary’s coming up soon.”

She’d heard that his parents had officially split after she’d transferred to YAC and still being friends with both Mike and Lynne on Facebook meant that she saw dozens of pictures of each of their respective weddings. Both times, she couldn’t miss Ricky’s stilted smile and lack of a date.

“Go Mike,” she cheers lamely, because she can’t think of anything else to say, and she knocks her glass against his.

“Yeah,” he says, and the word hangs in the silence that follows. When he speaks again, his words are more honest, more sincere than she’s expecting. “It was kind of brutal there for awhile when my mom left, and she was with Todd, and he was alone, but then he met Jenn and. . . you know. All’s well that ends well or whatever.”

She really can’t think of anything to say to that. She stares at Ricky, but he averts his gaze, staring at his wine glass like it’s the most interesting thing that he’s ever seen.

“I’m, uh—sorry about that summer, by the way,” he says quietly, twisting the thick band he’s wearing around his left index finger. It’s not the same one that he wore in high school. This one is plain silver, but he fiddles with it in the same way that tells her he’s nervous. “I just didn’t know how to talk about it—about my parents—with anyone, and I don’t think I really understood how bad it was until they were already ending it, and then it was over and. Anyway.” He looks up finally, and it’s been years but the expression he wears doesn’t look a day older than the Ricky she knew at sixteen. “I should have told you.”

“I would have understood,” she tells him gently—though, of course, she knows that’s easier for her to say in hindsight. What sixteen-year-old is actually emotionally equipped with the right thing to say about a failing marriage?

“No, I know,” he hurries to say, and he twists the ring around his finger once more. “It wasn’t you. It was me, which, god, that’s so cliché but it’s right, right? I mean, I couldn’t even tell you that I loved you when I did.”

She promptly chokes on the sip of wine that she’s taking.

Alarmed, Ricky quickly moves to pat her back, but before he can touch her, she waves him off, choking out one last cough. He gives her a small, awkward smile and in an attempt at levity, jokes, “Yeah, I’ve had a lot of years of therapy to unpack that one.”

She tries to look at him, tries to smile but can’t seem to do so successfully and looks away. Just loud enough for her to hear, he mumbles, “And apparently will need many more to unpack this conversation.”

“It’s fine,” she says, and she wishes she could will the heat in her cheeks away. “We were kids. I didn’t even really know what love was, you know? And I never should have posted that video on Instagram. So embarrassing,” she says more to herself than to him. To this day, she’s kept the Instagram video archived, not deleted as a sick reminder to never, ever do something so idiotic ever again.

“But it’s good to see you,” she adds as an afterthought, and it’s only after the words slip out of her mouth that she realizes that she means them.

He gives her one of his soft smiles that she remembers all too well, his doe eyes wide and boyish and too sincere. “It’s good to see you, too.”

\---

And she finds herself grateful that she meant what she said, about it being good to see Ricky, because from then on out, he’s basically around all the time, their two apartments tightly intertwined in one another’s lives.

Living in New York, her new routine looks like this: when she wakes up in the mornings, Ricky’s sitting at her kitchen table drinking coffee out of her Berklee mug while Big Red makes scrambled eggs on their stove. When she comes home from work, Ricky’s on her couch beside Gina watching reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and on Fridays, both apartments order pizza and play poker, wagering with Oreos and peanut M&Ms. She finds his abandoned sweatshirts on the back of their couch, and he keeps the coffee creamer he likes in their fridge, and his guitar lives beside her fiddle leaf fig by the window.

Only weeks into living in New York, she briefly wonders how Ricky managed to maneuver his way into her life so intricately before realizing that she’s actually the one infiltrating his apartment building, his plans, his friends, his life.

Becoming friends with him again isn’t an active decision she makes, and she isn’t even doing so for the sake of the group—it just happens, slipping into a part that she thought she forgot how to play.

The next time that they’re alone together, Nini’s on her way out to Trader Joe’s, and when she catches Ricky coming up the stairwell on his way home from work, she bites the bullet and asks if he wants to come.

They walk side by side and navigate the aisles together while he asks about her day. She tells him about her students, including the two working on a duet from The Greatest Showman, adding teasingly, “I think you’d really love it.”

He helps her bag up and carry her groceries and comes into her apartment to help her put them away as well, and it’s only natural that they wind up making dinner that night together, eating spaghetti side by side on the couch as they watch one of these reality singing competition shows.

It feels normal, like they could be friends or maybe like they already are.

Ricky’s different—which, of course, he is, she tells herself. She hasn’t known him, not really, since he was a kid. He keeps his hair a little longer than he used to, and he wears more than just hoodies, a requirement now that he’s an adult with a job. She listens to him talk about his work as a photo editor for Billboard, watching his eyes light up as he speaks about something he is deeply passionate about.

He’s gotten over his aversion to green beans, largely in part due to Big Red cooking them with bacon. He agrees to do stupid touristy activities when her roommates refuse on principle, following her around the Empire State Building and the High Line and the Met. When she wins lottery tickets to the revival of The Music Man and her coworker Carlos is busy, he offers to go with her, and he doesn’t even complain about them bursting into song once.

But it’s a small comfort to know that some things haven’t changed, that there’s still pieces of the boy that once made up the person she knew best.

He has the same smile, the kind that’s so blindingly bright when he means it. When he’s bored, he still strums mindlessly on his guitar, what she had deemed his elevator music once upon a time, and he tugs on his hair endlessly when stressed until his curls are frizzy and crazed. He can quote The Office word perfect, no matter the episode, and his headphones are always knotted up, and he almost always wears socks with at least one hole in them.

The next time she’s at the store, she eyes the salt and vinegar potato chips, the kind that Ricky loved once upon a time.

Gina wrinkles up her nose when she sees the bag of chips on their kitchen table. “Ew. Who likes these?”

“I—” Her gaze flicks over to Ricky who looks up from his laptop.

“Hey,” he says. “I like those.” He snatches a few chips for himself, shoving them in his mouth and crunching loudly as he continues working.

He’s different, older and depending on the day, wiser, but he’s still Ricky.

\---

Her moms send her a few of her remaining belongings that were collecting dust in her childhood home. Most notably, they send a stack of scrapbooks that Nini had painstakingly put together with more stickers and puffy paint that anyone should have ever owned.

“Baby Nini, I have to see,” Gina declares, pulling the sky blue scrapbook decorated with clouds off the top. She cracks it open and immediately coos. “Baby Nini _and_ baby Ricky,” she says, holding up the book for her to see.

For every year of school up until she went off to the YAC, her moms corralled Ricky and Nini into taking a first day of school photo together on their porch. The pictures served as a testament to their respective histories of bad haircuts and orthodontic work, but this picture in particular is when they were going into their eighth-grade year. It was the summer when the Salazar-Roberts took their trip to Cinque Terre, Ricky finally hit his growth spurt, and Nini had realized how hopelessly in like she was with her best friend. After taking this picture in which Ricky had slung an arm over her shoulders to pull her close into his chest, she’d dissected the small action for weeks.

“I can’t believe you two grew up together,” Gina says. “I can’t believe you guys _dated_.”

Her history with Ricky isn’t a secret to their friends, a fact of the matter thrown out in passing, but it’s not exactly something that either of them bring up often. In a way, becoming friends with him now makes the former years of knowing him feel like an alternate timeline she didn’t experience herself.

She waves a dismissive hand. “We were just kids.”

“Childhood friends to lovers,” Gina hums, flipping the page decorated with snowflake stickers and the Salazar-Roberts family Christmas photo from 2015. “I love that trope.”

Nini rolls her eyes before yanking the scrapbook out of her hands.

\---

It’s a Friday night, and Nini has the apartment to herself, relishing in a rare moment of solitude after a particularly exhausting work week when there’s a knock on the door. She tilts her head—her apartment is typically a revolving door of her friends, and since the guys have their own keys, she’s not sure if she’s ever heard someone actually knock since she moved in.

“Since when do you knock?” she asks when she opens the door to Ricky who cradles a paper bag to his chest.

He pushes into the apartment, setting the bag down on the table, and begins to pull out cartons of Chinese takeout. “I ordered way too much food for one person, and you seemed kind of stressed this week.” She blinks. She hadn’t thought anyone noticed that. “And I figured since you were alone, and I was alone. . .” He shrugs and throws a pair of chopsticks at her.

“Did you at least get chow mein?”

Ricky scoffs. “Obviously.” He pushes one of the cardboard containers towards her. “It’s like you think I don’t even know you.”

His words are light and breezy, and he immediately digs into his chicken and broccoli without a second thought. But for Nini, they stick, digging in her mind, because showing up with her comfort food after picking up on her subpar week, well, it kind of proves how well he does actually know her.

She sits down across from him at the kitchen table and opens the container of chow mein before saying, “I’m really glad that we’re friends.”

He pauses, a piece of chicken halfway to his lips, to smile sweetly at her. “Me, too. You kind of always just got me, I guess.” He shakes his head, looking down. “Maybe that’s dumb.”

“No!” she answers quickly, covering his hand with hers before she can stop herself. Her fingers cover the back of his hand, and his ring is cold against her palm. His eyes fly up to meet hers, and she falters under his warm gaze. “I mean, I know what you’re saying. I think we always got each other.”

She loves the life that she’s fallen into here, and she’s immensely grateful for how easily the established friend group welcomed in her when she knows they didn’t have to. Whether it initially be out of pity or as a favor to Kourtney, she’s not sure, but they feel truly like her own friends now.

And watching the boy across from her fumble with his chopsticks before shoving a piece of broccoli in his mouth, she thinks a teeny, tiny part of her might be especially grateful to have Ricky back in her life.

\---

E.J. gets promoted at work, and to celebrate, they all go to the bar down the street, dragging extra stools over to huddle tightly around the high-top table meant for two. Ricky offers to grab drinks for everyone, and while they wait, Nini tells Ashlyn all about the production of Bye Bye Birdie that her students are putting on.

“ _And_ we’ve lost him,” Big Red announces to the table.

Nini follows his gaze to see Ricky still leaning against the bar, but now a girl has joined him, twisting a lock of her dark hair around her finger as she says something to him with a coy smile. Ricky laughs in response, and Nini looks away, ignoring the way that her stomach twists. She shouldn’t have skipped dinner tonight.

It’s another minute before Ricky finally returns to their table, passing out everyone’s drink to them.

“Did you get her number?” E.J. asks before lifting the beer bottle to his lips.

  
“Huh?” Ricky asks, stealing a napkin from Ashlyn.

“That girl you were talking to,” Gina clarifies.

Ricky’s eyebrows furrow together in confusion before he glances back to the bar, and realization dawns on him. “Oh,” he says. “No?”

E.J. elbows him in the side, asking, “Why not?”

Ricky’s eyes catch Nini’s for a moment, and she feels her neck growing hot before, just as quickly, he looks back at E.J., shoving his shoulder lightly. “I already have my hands full enough with you, don’t I?”

\---

Ashlyn sets her up with someone from her office, insisting that Evan is a great guy.

Nini would deem him moderately okay at best. They go to a restaurant close to his apartment but all the way uptown from hers, and he opts to spend most of the night talking about his New York City marathon training regime. Their food arrives just as he launches into a detailed story about how common it is for runners’ nipples to bleed during a race, and she gets out of dessert by telling him that it’s a school night.

On her train home, she tries not to feel too disappointed by how utterly subpar the night is. Her lola always told her that she’s going to have to kiss a lot of frogs before finding the one, but it definitely doesn’t help that New York has eight million lily pads. It’s not like her love life has been a complete drought in the months since she moved here, but by no means has she met someone worthy of a slew of daydreams and love songs. Except.

When she arrives home, the living room is dark, Ashlyn and Gina already in their rooms for the night, and she almost misses Ricky asleep on the couch, wrapped up in a blanket. His face is smushed against one of their throw pillows, and one of his legs hangs halfway off the couch in a way that can’t possibly be comfortable, but his features are slack, worry-free with sleep, and her heart clenches at the sight with what she’d rather not say is endearment.

\---

She ends up falling asleep on his couch the very next week in the middle of E.J.’s pick for movie night, Fight Club, and she wakes up in the dark living room as the credits roll, tucked into someone’s side. It’s when she lifts her head off the other person’s chest that it dawns on her that it’s Ricky she’s practically on top of, his arms wrapped around her middle to keep her close.

She blinks sleepily up at Ricky, the realization that she should get off of him taking an embarrassingly long moment to arrive, but as she moves to get off the couch, he stirs in his sleep, his grip tightening around her under the blanket that they’re sharing.

“Ricky,” she whispers. When he doesn’t move again, she pokes his cheek until he finally blinks at her with drowsy eyes.

“Nini?” he mumbles, his features painted with confusion then disbelief before he lets his head fall back onto the pillow that they’re sharing.

“No, Ricky,” she pokes him again, smiling. “Don’t fall back asleep. I have to go to my apartment.”

“Do you really?” he grumbles, and he inches closer, bringing them practically nose to nose. “’M so comfortable.”

His eyes are closed, his eyelashes dark against his cheekbones, and his lips are parted ever so slightly in sleep, just a breath away from her own, and she’s comfortable, too, wrapped up in Ricky like this—it wouldn’t be difficult at all to just—

She really should go.

She pokes his cheek once more until he’s awake enough for her to disentangle herself, but she can’t miss the way his lips turn downward into a frown as he curls into himself in a tight ball now that she’s gone.

She goes back to her own bed across the hall, pulling her comforter up to her chin, and she hates that she’s not nearly as comfortable as she was.

\---

The week of her birthday, Ricky has to fly to L.A. for a photoshoot for work, but before he leaves, he drops off a gift for her. “But don’t open it until your actual birthday, okay?” he makes her promise.

She agrees, accepting the box wrapped in red paper and a neat bow, and does as she’s told, not touching it until her actual birthday when she’s surrounded by all her friends. The day has left her warm, brimming with happiness especially now that they’re all—or mostly all—together. Big Red makes the group dinner, and Gina makes double chocolate cupcakes, and they pile onto the couch, insisting that Nini opens all of her gifts right now. After unwrapping tickets to Hadestown from Big Red and E.J., a new sweater from Gina, and Lover on vinyl from Ashlyn, Gina passes her Ricky’s gift. “Don’t forget this one.”

She carefully peels the gift wrap and upon lifting the lid of the box, gasps softly at what’s inside.

“What is it?” Big Red asks, craning his neck to see.

Nini takes out the knit blanket, the yarn soft in her hands.

“A blanket?” E.J. asks, his nose scrunched up.

“I used to have a blanket just like this that my lola made.” She’d gotten it when she turned five and slept with it every night, warmed by the sentimental reminder that it represented her family and the love that they had for each other, until, as the years went on, it became too threadbare and tattered to hold on to. Her moms had eventually used what was left of the blanket as part of a larger quilt.

She looks down at the blanket in her arms, speaking more so to herself when she says, “I can’t believe he did this.” She can’t believe that he even remembered the blanket, let alone how much it had meant to her. It might be the most thoughtful gift she’s ever received, and her body sighs with hopeless endearment.

“Well,” E.J. announces, clapping his hands together. “It’s not like we can really be expected to compete with Ricky’s gift anyway when he’s in love with her.”

And just like that, all the air is sucked out of the room, everything screeching to a halt at E.J.’s words.

Nini stares at E.J. who gapes in the realization of what he said, and any former warmth and comfort from the day has been zapped, her body now tense as she attempts to process. Her throat dry, she breaks the silence to choke out, “Ricky’s in. . . he’s in—what did you say?”

E.J.’s eyes are wide as saucers. “Expected to compete.”

“After that?”

“Ricky’s gift?” he squeaks out.

“E.J.!” She turns to look at the rest of her friends who all wear expressions of horror mixed with guilt. “Guys, what is he talking about?”

Ashlyn averts her eyes to the ground, mumbling, “Right, Nini, about that.”

Big Red hurries to say, “You really, really, _really_ weren’t supposed to find out this way, but um.” He looks helplessly at Gina. “Gina, anything to add?”

If Gina speaks, Nini doesn’t hear it, her mind overcome with loud static, like two microphones stuck in an endless feedback loop, because Ricky loves her. Ricky Bowen loves her, Nini Salazar-Roberts. Ricky is in love with her, present tense, and she feels endlessly, hopelessly screwed.

\---

She can’t stop thinking about it.

Which, honestly, she thinks is fair, because how does a person _not_ think about one of their friends apparently being in love with them? Especially when that friend is currently one of the closest friends she has, not to mention the first person she ever loved?

She feels so taken aback by the confession itself that she’s not even sure how to unpack what, if anything, she should do about it.

She FaceTimes Kourtney, telling her everything and practically whines when she asks, “What am I supposed to do?” She knows that Kourtney’s built a separate friendship with Ricky after living in the same city as him, but she also knows that her friend will be honest with her no matter what.

“Well,” Kourtney asks. “How do you feel?”

Nini sighs, twisting her hands together. “Confused? Overwhelmed? I haven’t thought about him like that in so long.”

Kourtney’s expression softens. “But now? Do you think you could think about him like that?”

Nini swallows and looks at the knit blanket, Ricky’s gift, that’s bunched up in her lap.

Ricky wasn’t her first kiss, but he was the first one that mattered. After harboring a crush on him for two years, she’d mustered up the courage to kiss him on the brink of their sophomore year. Not for the first time that summer, he’d insisted on trying to teach her how to skateboard, which typically ended with an exasperated Nini and scraped up knees and both deciding to forget about it and get ice cream instead. Today, however, she’d managed for the first time not to fall or crash into anything, and after successfully bringing the skateboard to a stop without Ricky’s help, she skipped off the board, running over to her best friend and wrapping her arms around his neck as tight as could be. When he pulled back, his arms still around her waist and his eyes bright with excitement, she couldn’t help herself, couldn’t even think to second guess standing on her tiptoes to kiss him.

She can still remember the way that he kissed her back as if to say _finally_ , the warm affection that consumed her, and the breathless smile he gave her when she pulled away.

She hasn’t thought about that day in forever, and she knows that her cheeks are pink when she looks back at Kourtney, her friend a little pixelated on the computer screen.

“It’s a bad idea, right?” she asks instead of answering Kourtney’s question. “We broke up for a reason.”

“I don’t know,” Kourtney says, shrugging lightly. “You were kids, and Ricky’s so different now. You even said that yourself.”

It takes her a long moment before she concedes, “Right.”

“You know I love you, Neens,” Kourtney says. “And I’m not saying that you need to be with Ricky. But if you could see yourself interested in him like that—” She shrugs once more. “I think you owe it to yourself to see what it could be.”

Nini feels herself deflate at the words. Why does Kourtney always have to be right?

“Besides,” Kourtney adds. “It could end up being something great.”

\---

On the day he comes back from L.A., she texts Ricky welcome back and that she’s so excited to see him tonight! She stares at the message before sending it, almost deleting the exclamation point as if it gives away her renewed feelings completely. But then she feels stupid because she really does feel that exclamation point in its entirety at the idea of getting to see him again. It’s only been a week, but now her entire world feels tilted on its axis, all thoughts and signs and exclamation points in the direction of Ricky.

She sends the message.

She doesn’t know exactly what she’s going to do when she sees him, but unable to keep it to herself, she tells Gina and Ashlyn where her head is at, and the two girls squeal in delight. “Second chance love is the best,” Gina announces.

Big Red decides he’s going to make a soufflé that night, but it’s kind of a disaster since apparently the girls’ oven isn’t appropriately equipped for such a task, and Gina and E.J. wrestle over the remote before Gina emerges victorious, flipping on a Real Housewives marathon, when Ricky enters the apartment.

“Ricky!” Big Red cheers, and the boys embrace tightly like Ricky’s returned from a drawn-out war, not a weeklong business trip. Ricky ruffles Big Red’s hair affectionately when he pulls away.

Twisting in her seat, for the first time since E.J. announced that Ricky’s in love with her, she sees him with his messy hair and his bright smile and his eyes, light with joy, and her hearts swells at the sight, the awful confirmation that she’s been dreading for days.

Yeah. She definitely likes him.

“Hey!” she greets him as brightly as she can, and then she catches Ashlyn’s pointed look and the nod of Gina’s head, and she jumps up from the couch. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Of course.”

She leads the way to her room, avoiding the sensation that her friends are burning holes into the back of her head with their gazes as she does so, and shuts the door behind them. Seated across from one another on her bed, she asks about his trip, which he says went great, and he asks about her week, which she sidesteps because her entire week was consumed thinking about _him_.

“Actually—” She’s a breath away from bringing up his birthday gift when his phone buzzes. His face lighting up at the sound, Ricky moves to grab it, but then seeming to catch himself and realizing that he doesn’t want to be rude, he pauses and refrains from checking his text.

But his expression is enough to make her falter. Instead of the words that were on the tip of her tongue moments prior, her next question slips out before she can swallow it back. “Who is that?”

He takes this as permission to check his phone. “This girl, Quinn,” he tells her, his voice trailing off as he reads the message. His mouth curves into a soft smile as his eyes scan the screen, and her heart twists suddenly in new discomfort in her chest.

“Quinn?” she squeaks.

He looks up from his phone, and his deep brown eyes have adopted a dreamy gaze. “I know this sounds crazy, but I met this girl, Quinn, on my plane, and we ended up talking the entire flight and then got dinner at the airport and then drinks afterwards and then every night while we were in L.A., and—” He stops and blinks away the blissful look in his eyes. “Sorry, this isn’t about me. You wanted to tell me something, right?”

She stares at him, her mind slow on the uptake of his words, only managing to comprehend enough to know that the look in his eye is enough to make her bite her tongue, the courage she’s been mustering up the last few days slipping through her fingers. Ricky tilts his head at her, waiting, and she swallows.

“Thank you so much for my gift,” she tells him, and she wishes that she could pack enough subtext into her words that he would just magically know about the epiphany that she’s had. “It really meant a lot to me.”

“Of course,” he replies with an easy smile. “Anything for you, Neens.”

And as she watches him stand and return to their friends in the living room, she can’t help wondering how he’s supposed to be the one in love with her this time but she’s still the one staring helplessly at him as he goes.

\---

“Are you okay?” Kourtney asks over their FaceTime call that night.

After her conversation with Ricky, she’d quickly brushed off the inquisitive looks from Gina and Ashlyn, Ricky answering their unasked questions for her when he brings up his date with Quinn that weekend.

“She’s really great,” he says, not looking up from his phone. “I think you guys will really like her.”

Gina narrows her eyes in a glare that Ricky’s not paying attention to see. “Are you sure about that?”

“I’m fine,” she tells Kourtney, and she hates how her voice wobbles on the word. “I think this is the universe telling me that Ricky and I are better left in the very distant past.” She shakes her head. “Which I already knew, so it’s not like I should care, right?”

Kourtney gives her a small, sympathetic smile. “Nini, it’s okay to be sad.”

She lifts her shoulders in a tiny shrug. Despite her friend’s words, she doesn’t think it’s right of her to mourn a four-day long crush or mull over what could have been too deeply. If it’s not meant to be, that’s fine. Ricky never has to find out that she knows about his former feelings for her, and he never, ever has to find out that she may have been interested back. Her friendship with him can continue in its existing state of normalcy—no harm, no foul.

\---

After Ricky’s been seeing Quinn for a month, he introduces her to everyone one night at the bar.

They’ve all heard enough about her in the last weeks that it feels like Nini can’t possibly learn anything new about her—she’s from Connecticut originally and is currently in law school at Columbia. “Basically, she’s a genius,” Ricky bragged when he told them. She wears her blonde hair in waves and loves James Taylor and has coerced Ricky into drinking kombucha, which Nini now finds in their fridge alongside her orange juice. She does yoga and loves cats and eats pineapple pizza, which Ricky used to insist was disgusting but now thinks is adorable.

Really, it’s like she’s already met her.

But that night, she learns that Quinn drinks her vodka sodas with a lemon instead of a lime, which is definitely weird, and since Ricky’s told her all about Nini’s job, Quinn asks about her students, telling her emphatically, “I _love_ kids.” Quinn keeps her hand on Ricky’s knee at all times, tilting her head close to his when they whisper about something, and when Ricky drags her away to play darts, Quinn lets him stand behind her, hand in hand, as he shows her how to throw a bullseye.

Despite herself, Nini feels sick to her stomach as the night wears on, and she excuses herself early, telling everyone that she has an early morning tomorrow. Ashlyn says goodbye to everyone as well, offering to walk home with her, and when the duo exits, Ashlyn loops her arm through hers.

“Quinn seems nice,” Nini says out of nowhere, because she feels like she has to even though it’s just her and Ashlyn and no one’s even asking.

“Yeah,” Ashlyn agrees quietly, tucking her head onto Nini’s shoulder as they walk. They don’t say anything else until they’re home.

After Ricky’s been seeing Quinn for two months, he pulls Nini aside and says, hands spread out in front of her, “You’re a girl.”

“Yes, thank you for noticing.”

He rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean.”

She rolls her eyes back at him but smiles when she asks, “Yeah, I do. What’s up?”

Her heart sinks when he asks advice on what he should do for Quinn’s birthday next week, laying out what he already has planned. He got reservations to the first restaurant they went to on their first date and a necklace with her birthstone because apparently, she loves how sapphire complements her blue eyes. “I want the night to be special,” he tells her, and when she stares at him blankly, he gives her a pointed look, eyebrows raised.

Oh. _Oh._ “You’ve dated a lot of people,” she replies, opening the book in her hands back to the part she’d left off on, but for as hard as she stares at the page, the words don’t come into focus. “I think you’re doing fine on your own.”

He gives her a baleful look. “Exactly, I’ve dated a lot of people, and none of them have ever worked out. I don’t want to screw this up, Neens.”

At the sound of her nickname, she feels like her ribcage is going to collapse in on her own heart, but she marks her place in her book. “Just be you,” she tells him. “And it’ll be special, okay?”

He gives her the smallest of smiles and looking at him feels like the nicest way to hurt her own heart.

After Ricky’s been seeing Quinn for three months, Nini considers how much easier everything would be if she could hate her, but really, Quinn’s nice. She’s going into environmental law, which is basically the nicest kind of lawyer you could choose to be, and makes Ricky homemade lemon bars and memorizes every fact that Ricky tells her about his friends because she wants them all to like her. The girl has a heart of eighteen carat gold unlike Nini whose own heart is marred with jealousy and resentment and misery.

But Quinn makes Ricky happy, evident by the lovesick expression he wears all of the time nowadays, and shouldn’t that be enough for Nini to be okay?

The first time she sees Ricky kiss Quinn, it’s in the hallway outside his apartment, and she almost drops the cup of coffee in her hand at the sight of him pulling her close, her hands in his hair. Before they can see her, she turns around, taking the stairs two at a time until she reaches the next landing and sinks to the ground until the ugly match of jealousy inside her burns out, at least for now.

\---

A bad snowstorm hits in December, and the howling wind and steady snowfall leaves their apartment building without power.

The two apartments gather into the girls’ living room, gathering all the candles that they own on the coffee table. With the power and in turn, heat, out, it’s freezing inside even after Nini slips on a second pair of fuzzy socks, and they all wrap up in blankets, circled up and bathed in candlelight. Ricky even tugs on the ugliest hat that she’s ever seen, an orange and red knit that’s too big for his head. She flicks one of the pom poms that dangle off the hat’s braids, and he nudges her away, texting back Quinn who is holed up in her own apartment.

“It’s really coming down out there,” Ashlyn says, rubbing her mitten-clad hands together for warmth, and watches the flurries dance outside the window as the snow comes down.

E.J. groans loudly, hanging his head back towards the ceiling. “I’m _bored_. Aren’t you guys bored?”

Gina rolls her eyes from where she’s curled up on the couch but grabs a deck of cards, coercing the group into playing gin rummy just for something to do until Ashlyn begs off to sleep in her own room. Gina follows suit, and eventually Nini pokes Ricky beside her to get him to look at Big Red as he snores softly on the couch, his head resting on a sleeping E.J.’s shoulder.

“I love the snow,” she says wistfully, leaning back against the side of the arm chair. Ricky’s beside her underneath a shared blanket, shoulder to shoulder, and together, they watch the snow continue to fall outside. She knows that the pristine winter wonderland won’t last long in the city, the snow soon to turn into muddled, gray slush in the streets, but for now, she loves the way that the quiet neighborhood sparkles.

“Do you remember that time we snuck out for the first snow of the year?” Ricky asks suddenly.

It was sophomore year and the one and only time Nini ever snuck out, meeting up with Ricky at the park in between their houses after Salt Lake City was blanketed in the first snowfall of the year. She’d been on the brink of turning sixteen, but with Ricky, it was easy to feel like a little kid, making snow angels side by side and a snowman with a guitar pick for a nose. Before they’d parted ways, he kissed her goodnight. She can still remember the feeling of his cold nose bumping against hers before their lips met, the brush of his gloved fingers resting on her neck, how she felt so, so warm despite the cold.

“And how you got grounded when your parents caught you?” she asks, squashing her own tinted memories of that night. “Yeah, I remember.”

He shakes his head, the corner of his mouth turning upwards into a smile, and she adds, “To be fair, you got in significantly less trouble then than the time you broke the vase my moms got for their ten-year anniversary.” He grimaces at the memory, and she laughs, continuing, “Or when you decapitated my American Girl doll. Oh! Or that time—”

“Okay, okay,” he cuts her off, elbowing her in the side lightly. “I get it. We had a lot of not so great times.”

She looks over to see him facing forward, the candles spread out in front of them causing the light to flicker across his face. She studies his profile: his unfairly long, dark eyelashes, the slope of his nose, his lips—nope, not helping, and she quickly looks away.

He’s been dating Quinn for almost five months now, and she wishes that her feelings for him would wither away already. She’s been doing her best to water them down by keeping busy, spending time with her friends from work, going on dates with anyone and everyone else, because he’s happy, having something great with Quinn, and she’s trying to be okay with that.

And yet, she finds herself murmuring, “We had a lot of great times, too.”

She can feel Ricky’s gaze shift to look at her, and before she can help herself, her eyes find his, leaving them closer now than she can remember being with Ricky since, well, anytime recently. His shoulder remains pressed against her side, and his eyes bore into hers, dark and unreadable in the low light until she’s certain that she sees his gaze shift momentarily to look at her lips.

When his eyes are back on hers, they look darker than ever, and she swallows hard at the sight before ever so fractionally leaning in just barely closer to Ricky before realizing that he’s doing the same. Anticipation seeps through her, the world blurring at its edges, and between her fuzzy view and the snow she knows is falling outside, it almost feels like they’re in their own private snow globe, inching closer and closer until—

“E.J., get _off_ of me,” Big Red exclaims from behind them, shattering the heady moment, and she wrenches backwards from Ricky, the utter wrongness of it all washing over her. He has Quinn, and she _can’t_ —she’s not that kind of person except wasn’t she just almost? Burning in regret, she’s unable to get as far away from him as she’d like when she gets tangled up in the blanket.

E.J. grumbles loudly as he stirs awake, blindly smacking the other boy on the couch, and Nini scrambles to her feet, mumbling something about going to her room, shutting the door behind her without a second glance back.

\---

She decides that she won’t think about it.

Because thinking about it means seeing the look in Ricky’s eye when he’s on the edge of kissing someone, a look that she thought that she’d never see again, a fact that she was already trying to be okay with. It means feeling the same rush of blurry-eyed warmth that she had that night, a feeling that she refuses to associate with attraction or desire or _worse_ , love for Ricky Bowen, because he’s with Quinn, not her, and he’s happy. It means being reminded of how she’d been the one to lean into him first, cringe-inducing embarrassment and guilt at how awful of a person that makes her washing over her until she has to scream into a pillow to make the terrible feeling go away.

But it’s fine; she doesn’t have to be affronted with any of that because she’s decidedly not thinking about it.

\---

Quinn and Ricky have been dating for six months to the day when Kourtney visits for the weekend. Nini wants to assume that it’s a coincidence, but it’s harder to believe that her friends aren’t on a Cheer Nini Up agenda when they insist on a girls’ only night in the apartment, stocked with pizza, way too much wine, and what Ashlyn swears is the least romantic film of all time, Braveheart.

They decide to play a drinking game—drink anytime the movie is historically inaccurate—and by the time that Mel Gibson is declaring that they can never take their freedom, Nini doesn’t even know who _they_ is, giggling in her drunken stupor.

“This was a great idea,” she declares, the words coming out slurred, but she can’t help it; her tongue feels too heavy and loose to be able to speak clearly.

Gina nods enthusiastically. “We don’t have enough nights without the guys.”

At the mention of their friends, Ashlyn jabs Gina hard, and Nini’s smile turns sour as she stares at her empty wine glass. She hates that they all know exactly what—or who—she’s thinking about, hates even more that they felt like they needed to orchestrate any entire evening to make her feel better about a boy that she never actually had any claim over.

“God, this is so stupid,” she announces to the room. “I have my friends and a job and my health, and you guys are just the best, my favorite people in the world, and Kourtney’s here—” She waves a hand in her friend’s direction. “And you’re never here, so why do I even care about some stupid, dumb. . . great boy?” She bites down hard on her lip, trying to think, something that’s become increasingly more difficult for her in the last few hours. “I just want to get over him. Why is that so hard?”

Gina shrugs helplessly, the room settling into silence until Kourtney says, “After all this time, I think you just need to find some closure. You—”

“Closure!” Nini gasps. “That’s it. That’s what I need. Kourtney, you are so smart. Seriously, the smartest.” She reaches for her phone, and she messes up entering her password the first time but gets it on the second try, pulling up her contacts.

“Neens, what are you doing?”

“Give me one second,” she insists, jabbing Ricky’s name hard with her thumb to begin calling him before holding up the phone to her ear.

“Nini—”

“I’m on the phone,” she whispers loudly. She waits while it rings once, twice, three times before going to voicemail. “Hey, this is Ricky,” she hears his voice say. “You know what to do.”

“Ricky! Hi. Crazy to find you here. I’m calling to say that I’m fine. Everything’s fine, because I’m really happy for you and Quinn and you and Quinn as a couple, and you know why I can be happy for you? Because I’m over you. A hundred thousand million percent over you, so you don’t need to worry about me anymore. Because I’m what? That’s right—over you.” Her words come out a mile a minute, and she feels powerful, like the heaviest weight is lifting off her chest. Kourtney’s right—closure feels great. She’s just about to hang up when it hits her. “This is Nini, by the way!” she adds and then ends the call with a click of a button.

She looks up to see her friends staring at her in stunned silence, mouths agape, and she smiles sweetly at them. “I think I nailed it,” she says, tossing her phone onto the couch.

\---

She wakes up with a throbbing headache, cotton dry mouth and muddled memories at best from the night before. Padding out into the living room in her pajamas, she’s only managed to piece together the ABBA karaoke session and bottle of wine that she consumed, which she chased with one of Gina’s chocolate chip cookies, when Ricky enters the apartment.

“Good morning,” he greets her cheerily and entirely too loudly for her liking.

She groans in response, waving for him to keep it down, and he chuckles when he sees how deeply suffering from a hangover she is.

“Wild and crazy night, Neens?” he asks teasingly.

“Something like that,” she mumbles, dragging a hand through her hair as she peers up at him with one eye still shut.

“Well, I was hoping that you had a phone charger that I could use?” he asks. “My phone’s been dead since yesterday.”

She nods and points him in the direction of the phone charger she knows is plugged in by their toaster. She shoves her face into the couch, mostly in an effort to block out the light but finds that it weirdly comforts her headache as well.

Just as she thinks about going into Gina’s room to ask what on Earth happened last night, she hears Ricky ask, “Hey, did you call me last night? I have a voicemail from you.”

She lifts her head off the couch. “You have a. . . ” Her mind swirls anew, churning through the thick slog of blurry memories from last night before it hits her.

Oh, _God._

She leaps up off the couch, launching herself over the back of it to get to Ricky faster, and she reaches him, grabbing onto his shoulders—but it’s too late.

He has his phone pressed to his ear, and she watches his face like a horror film as her drunken words from last night wash over him. His phone falls from his ear as his eyes go big, lips parting wordlessly, and his Adam’s apple rises and falls as he swallows hard.

“You’re over me?” he manages to choke out. “When were you. . . under me?”

His eyes look glassy and unfocused, looking at but not really seeing her, but it’s not enough. In this moment, she wishes she were truly invisible.

“Basically. . . recently. . . I have been considering the possibility that I might _maybe_ have feelings for you,” she says, each word carefully selected like she’s attempting to navigate a minefield.

Until she throws caution to the wind and adds, pointing at him accusatorily, “But you liked me first!”

Ricky’s eyebrows shoot up, panic lighting up his face. “Wait— _wait_ , what? How—”

She draws back her hand, wrapping her arms around herself in a hug. “E.J. told me.” she admits.

“ _E.J._ told you?” he echoes, looking newly horrified.

“It was an accident,” she says quickly, “And everyone else confirmed it—”

“ _Everyone_?”

Right, probably not helping there. “Well.” She swallows, and it feels stupid, but she has to know. “I mean. Were they right?”

Ricky’s features soften, but she catches the regret in his tone to know that his words won’t be comforting. “Yeah, of course, Neens. I have—I _had_ feelings for you, but now.” His silence blankets them, the rest of his sentence hanging in the air: now he has Quinn.

And if on cue, his phone begins to ring, and he checks the screen before sending her a helpless look. “I have to go.”

Her mouth falls open. “Right now?”

“We have—we’re supposed to. . . Her parents are in town. I have to go, I’m sorry,” he finishes finally. He moves towards the door, his phone and keys in hand, before pausing to look back at her. He messes with the ring on his hand as he stares at her, and feeling utterly vulnerable in her pajamas, looking like a hungover wreck, she can’t help but shiver under his gaze.

Before he’s gone, he says, “But we’ll talk, I swear.”

\---

She doesn’t hear from Ricky for the rest of that day. Or the day after that, or the one after that, and with his silence, the bitter sting of rejection grows into genuine anger.

After all, this entire thing is his fault. If it wasn’t for him liking her in the first place, she never would have even _thought_ about his stupid face in anything more than a platonic way, and really, he should have never said anything to their friends, putting them all in an unfair position in which they were required to lie to Nini. Really, he shouldn’t have been surprised that she found out eventually, and just exactly what was he expecting to do when that happened since he evidently had no intention on ever telling her how he felt himself?

Three days after she last saw him, she’s in the kitchen eating Cheerios when an out of breath Ricky bursts through their door, declaring, “I’m ready to talk now.”

Her spoon falls into her bowl, and it takes a second for Nini to compose herself enough to ask, “I’m sorry. What?”

A smile splits his face, and she narrows her eyes at his exuberance. “I’m ready to talk now about you. Me. Us,” he says, clapping his hands together.

She shakes her head, picking up her bowl and placing it in the sink, her back to him when she says, “I think I got your message loud and clear.”

“What do you mean?”

She turns to see the crease between his furrowed eyebrows, the genuine confusion on his face, and she bristles, spitting out, “Are you kidding me?” He tilts his head, and she sighs, continuing, “You ran out of here, haven’t talked to me in days, and now you show up, magically ready to talk, and I’m supposed to listen?”

“Well. . .” Ricky shifts back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Yeah.”

“No,” she reprimands. “That’s not how this works.”

The confusion on his face increases tenfold. “What do you mean how this works?”

“Come on, Ricky,” she says, shaking her head. “You know exactly—”

He runs a hand through his hair, tugging in annoyance when he says, “Nini, can you just—”

“What I mean—”

“Let me speak?” he tries to cut through.

But she continues, steadfastly ignoring his attempts to interrupt her to say firmly, “And I don’t want to hear it—”

Ricky lets out an exasperated huff and grabs her arm, yanking her towards him, and kisses her before she can say anything else, the words dying on her lips. And it feels like all that she'd tried to forget, all that she'd shoved into the back of her mind, willing it away until it was nothing—except this, kissing Ricky, is everything. Before she can so much as think, she pushes herself onto her tiptoes, kissing him back in a way that sounds like _finally_. She feels his hands cup her face, his fingers splayed across her cheekbones, and her heart simply pounds in her chest, ready to burst.

When he pulls back, he doesn’t move away, and she can feel his breath fan across her face when he says, “I broke up with Quinn.”

“Oh,” she exhales, her mind helpless in the aftermath of being kissed by Ricky, unable to properly keep up with what he's saying.

“I thought that was my line,” he quips, and she wants to laugh or shove him or roll her eyes, but she can’t even breathe right now to think of managing any of the above. She opens her eyes finally, and Ricky ducks his head to look right at her, continuing, “I broke up with her for you, if that wasn’t clear. I meant what I said when you moved here. I loved you even when I couldn’t tell you, and even though I was stupid then, I don’t want to be stupid now.”

She swallows, her next words stuck in the back of her throat, “Thank you for clarifying.”

He drops his hands from her face, sliding them around her waist, and she allows him to pull her closer, her fingers digging into his shoulder blades. She feels like she might float away in a dizzy, happy cloud if she’s not anchored to the ground.

“So, in an effort to work backwards. Do you want to go on a date sometime?” he asks, and she nods, her forehead knocking against his at the motion. He grins then pulls back again, clarifying entirely too seriously, “With me?”

She edges backward in his arms to peer up at him, her eyes bright. “Well, in that case, never mind—”

“Shut up,” he mutters, rolling his eyes before sealing his lips against hers again. He’s smiling too hard to kiss her properly, but she thinks that she’s okay with that—waiting so long to kiss Ricky again means that she’ll happily take any kind of kiss from him that she can get.

And this time, it really does feel like the start of something great.


End file.
